If your law firm or legal practice is looking for some help with web marketing, then this brief article is for you. Whether you're seeking a freelancer or full-service web marketing company, recruiting top-notch talent is not easy.

So in this Law Firm Web Marketing post, we share 3 considerations to be mindful of when recruiting a company or specialist for web marketing services.

Know Thy Brand

One of the most overlooking aspect of recruiting a web marketer is understanding how well they care about your brand. The best web marketing companies staff honest professionals who take the time to immerse themselves in the brand's image, voice, and overall direction. Why is this important for web marketing?

Web marketing companies help with all facets of your online brand. To helping produce press releases and articles to making posts on social media, in many ways, a web marketing company is deeply involved in your brand and its image. Make sure that they truly care and understand what that image is.

How Well-Versed?

Some web marketing companies are kin to only a couple select specialties or skill-sets. For instance, some web marketers are fixated on search marketing (SEO & PPC advertising), whereas others focus solely on content marketing and social media.

Finding a balance is key. When recruiting and interviewing prospects, be sure to get all of this out on the table. Share some of your law firm's primary goals and objectives, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. A solid web marketing company will know how its strengths can help bolster your firm's weaknesses.

Communication is Key

Like we mentioned before, a web marketing provider is often very immersed in your law firm's day to day marketing efforts. For this reason, solid communication is essential.

In addition to the basics, like responding to emails and phone calls in a timely manner, the web marketing company should also be able to provide reports and data as to what they are doing to help grow your law firm. Almost everything web marketing is now measurable. So your web marketing recruit should be able to come up with some information to keep you posted.

For more insights and resources, ranging from effective recruiting gifts to learning more about web marketing best practices, stay in-tune with the Law Firm Web Marketing blog.

Web design and development can be very closely entwined with SEO. However, it's unfortunate that this often synergistic combination is often segregated and overlooked.

In essence, SEO-friendly web design means designing the site in a way that search engines can easily interpret content, as well as crawl and index the site (from a technical standpoint.)

In addition to having a well-brand and functional web design, the primary goal of many businesses and law firms is to get their site ranked in search engines like Google. This results in targeted traffic and an opportunity to expand their reach online and get more sales. By having a website developed and designed using SEO-friendly practices, you'll have a much better chance at being successful with your marketing efforts.

Below, we share some of the best practices of technical SEO when it comes to SEO-friendly web design.

Easy Access to Editing Meta Data

Every page on a website has a Meta title, description, and tags. Editing these HTML attributes can be difficult with some websites. An SEO-friendly web design company provides you with easy access to editing this data.

When it comes to SEO and keyword optimization, the title, description and tags should include your target keywords for that page of the website. More thorough web design companies may even research your target keywords and write out these fields for you. This can save you a great deal of work and it's something to consider.

Find Alternatives to Flash Media

Flash media isn't the greatest thing to use in a web design, as search engine spiders cannot crawl this content. Additionally, many devices do not support Flash and if a visitors accesses your site from a mobile phone, tablet, or computer that doesn't support Flash, they won't be able to see anything. It's better to just avoid the use of Flash on your company's web design, especially since it provides no SEO benefit to use Flash on a website.

Optimize Images & Media for Faster Load Speeds

Any images or media on the page should be optimized and cached if possible. This will create faster load speeds for the website, which is an important aspect of SEO-friendly web design. The faster your website loads, the more likely search engines are to allow your site to be placed among the top results.

Slow websites obviously are less preferred as it will be irritating to their users to try and access a slow website. Optimizing images and media can be easily done with plugins that you download and install on the website.

Clean Code That's HTML5 Compliant

Clean code that's simplistic, HTML5 compliant and error free is important to SEO. Web design and development best practices are based on the fact that the less code you have, the easier search engine spiders will be able to crawl your website and find your content.

Search engine spiders can also detect errors in code and whether or not its up to current standards. Although there is still debate over whether Google takes these factors into great consideration with their algorithm, the opportunity for them to do so is there.

There are a lot of back-end HTML elements that are important to SEO. Web design companies are very aware of this and SEO-friendly web design has become a popular request among clients. If you're curious what types of things are actively done to make a new development project SEO-friendly, what you'll find above are the most common.

Many savvy legal professionals are wondering how social media impacts SEO. Even though social media signals’ role in the ranking algorithms of Bing and Google is still embryonic, there's no doubt that these mechanisms are influencing SEO.

But more than just social signals (e.g. Facebook Likes, Shares, +1's, Pins, Tweets, etc.,) social media is beginning to rear an even great impact on SEO. So in this law firm web marketing post, we share 5 different ways in which social media impacts SEO.

Increases Site Engagement and Traffic Volume

One of the key factors employed in search engine rankings is the traffic volume that is visiting a particular website. In most cases, most traffic from social media is driven by event listings, blog posts, videos, or any other exciting content. If that content can make users stick around for some minutes rather than bouncing right away, it may help to improve search results. Search engines have the capacity to measure these metrics such as the bounce-rate, pages over visit, as well as time on site.

Social Media Personalizes Search Results

When a user is signed in, Google makes use of Google+ activity and reviews to personalize search results. For instance, if an individual is connected to you via Google+, and you have liked a page, made a business review or made a post on Google+ about a topic that the individual is searching about, that result will likely be ranked higher for him/her due to the connection.

The same thing is being done by Bing with Facebook activity of friends. Even though it’s hard to quantify, this personalizing of results has a way of impacting SEO.

Increases Link Potential

The awareness of website content or brand can be increased with the help of social media activity. This increased awareness can produce links. For instance, assuming a company posts a video of one of its new product features, which (the video) gets shared 20 times on Facebook. One of those posts is seen by another Facebook user who runs a blog. The blogger chooses to write about that new product feature and links back to the website and video of the brand in the article. That link only occurred after the writer had seen a post about the video.

Even though the links in the 20 posts didn’t directly contribute to the website’s overall link profile, they led to links being placed on a website via the article. These links have a say in the website’s overall link profile, thus impacting Search Engine Optimization.

Search Query Volume

Social media exposes one’s name to a wider audience. This helps to increase the overall awareness of a brand, thus leading to more persons searching for their brand. Google awards a higher ranking to brands that are being searched for by more people. This naturally depends on the query that is being searched for and is frequently more of a naturally branded search opportunity.

Authorship

According to the information provided by Google, in the future identities will be incorporated into search rankings. This implies that basing on the likely audience size, their authority and relevancy to the topic; some pages will get a higher ranking than others.

According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, this is already happening to some degree for verified profiles. In the search results, the information which will be tied to confirmed/verified online profiles will have higher rankings than that devoid of such verification.

Search engines are becoming more refined at interpreting search content, fighting organic spam and delivering relevant results; and thus yesterday’s SEO tactics no longer score it. To have a clear understanding of what is credible, relevant and popular; search engines are resorting to social media.

Google+ has grown significantly in recent months, and it's starting to become a real contender against other, longer-standing social media sites.

Not only is there a rising number of users on this popular site, but the pages show-up in the organic search engine results (Google local listings.) As a result, Google+ has served as valuable tool to advance your firm's local SEO efforts and promote your legal services to qualified parties.

If you haven't taken full advantage of this site yet, you should consider these five tips for Google+ Local optimization to get the most out of this exciting social media network.

1. Fully Populate Your Law Firm's Google+ Page

First and foremost, you shouldn't leave any empty spaces on your Google+ Local page. Make sure that you make it clear what type of law firm you operate, where it is located and when your business hours are; this will have an impact on how easily your profile pops up in the search engine rankings.

Not only will providing this information make your Google+ Local page more likely to appear when people are looking for law firms in your area, but offering complete transparency will make your law firm seem legitimate and respectable. Plus, adding your website address, phone numbers, fax numbers and more will make it that much easier for potential clients to get in contact with you.

2. Encourage Client Reviews

It's easy for previous clients to leave reviews on your Google+ Local profile, and you should encourage them to do so whenever possible. Reviews show that people have used your services in the past, which can net you a higher standing with Google+ as a whole. Plus, when potential clients see positive reviews from satisfied previous clients, they will be more likely to want to hire you for their legal needs.

3. Apply Keyword Optimization and Other SEO Techniques

Keyword optimization and SEO aren't just important on your website; they're important on your Google+ Local profile as well. For maximum optimization potential, you should incorporate appropriate and relevant keywords; this will help your profile pop up in the search engine rankings and will help you gain more well-targeted traffic.

4. Use Third-Party Reviews

First-hand reviews from your loyal clients aren't the only thing that can help you establish legitimacy and help bring your profile to the top. Generating good reviews and citations will help show that you are in touch with your client base and will help you establish a strong reputation.

5. Prove Your Firm's Legitimacy

There are a lot of law firms, businesses and other organizations that are fighting to be found on Google, and some of them aren't so legitimate. Therefore, you have to prove that your firm is a legitimate business and that you are a legitimate lawyer. Ensuring that your profile comes across as a fully legitimate extension of your law firm will help ensure that you are well-respected by Google+ and therefore recommended to more potential clients.

One way of ensuring this is to submit and verify your Google+ Local page. This option can be found while in edit mode on your firm's page. Once submitted, Google will send out a personalized postcard with a PIN verification which you must later confirm on the page. This is Google's way of ensuring the legitimacy of your law firm and local business.

If you haven't jumped on board with Google+ Local or haven't focused on Google+ Local optimization, now is the time to do it. This site has grown exponentially in a short period of time, and it will only get bigger. Making sure that you're fully visible on this important social media site can mean good things for you and your law firm.

Local SEO for law firms and legal professionals is a lot different than optimizing a site for the entire world wide web. In short, the Google local search results is influenced by different factors than the results shown for general, non-geographically relevant searches.

There are a lot of things which a law firm need to follow for making their website optimal for local search. Below we share advanced SEO tips which should be utilized by local law firms that want to have higher rankings in the local search results.

Learn and Implement Local Business Schema Markup

Local business schema markup is HTML markup in which standardizes the information related to a local business for all the big three search engines. Google, Bing and Yahoo have come together to create this schema markup so that businesses can provide all the related information in a particular set of code and the search engine crawlers can crawl their website and gather this information to display in their Web results.

For example, in Google local search results, the opening hours and closing hours of a local business are clearly available. These timings are picked up by search engine spiders from the data wrapped in Local Business Schema Markup. Having the required data in a structured way on the web page provides information to search engines about your business and the more information you provide, the more relevant search results are going to be. Having proper data will not only result in higher rankings but also higher click throughs on the search results page to your website.

Audit Your Citations

For general queries on the search engines, back links from high page rank websites matter a lot. In the world of local SEO, the citations play an equally important role.

In the case of local SEO one should keep regularly auditing their citations. The more authentic their citations are, the better for the website in local SEO. If there are many variations of your local citations out there on the web, it will confuse the search engines and your web rankings will suffer.

To properly audit your local citations, you'll need to crawl the scan with multiple variations of your business name, your phone number, your business address. Once you identify the various different versions, you should reach out to the websites which host these variations and request them for corrections at the end.

Build Links from Locally Relevant Sites

For local SEO, it is important to have links from locally-relevant sites sites. For example, if you are trying to rank for locksmiths in New York City, then back links from related local sites will help you a lot in search engine rankings as compared to backlink from a Los Angeles based business.

Relevancy has become very important these days in Google's current search engine ranking algorithm. The more relevant links pointing to your website, the higher your rank is going to be in the search results. Therefore, your backlink building should be geared toward locally relevant sites.

Get Social (Both Online and Off-Line)

Do you know anyone who is not out there on one of the many social networks? Chances are you do not know anyone who is not there on either Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. The world is becoming more and more social each day.

It is important for a business to build up the social presence. Social presence does not solely mean creating a Facebook page or having an instagram account or having a Twitter profile. A business for effective social networking should be active on their social media accounts.

They should interact with their clients, listen to their needs and solve their problems. Also, off-line networking is as important as online social networking. Businesses should participate in off-line conferences and trade shows. These off-line conferences and trade shows often result in a very relevant back links and citations for your business online.

From a local SEO perspective, social media adds an extra layer of credibility to your company. The more people you have in your social circles (beyond Google+ circles,) the more legitimacy search engines see in your business. Local Peoria SEO company, Online Innovative Creations does a great job at this. This Peoria SEO company has a deep social media audience and uses this audience to share quality content and inbound traffic naturally.

Produce and Publish Content Regularly

Search engines are always looking for fresh content. In the online world, a business needs to constantly produce and publish fresh and interesting content targeted at their customer base. Search engine algorithms give more weightage to fresh and interesting content and consequently websites which produce content on a regular basis end up higher in the search engine rankings. Therefore, producing and publishing content on a regular basis is very important for gaining and maintaining higher search engine rankings.

Are you kin to SEO and getting the most search engine exposure from your blog posts? We thought so. What decent blogger or content marketer wouldn't want to get their work in front of as many eyes as possible (especially eyes that are actively seeking topics related to your content.)

If you're interested in master your blog SEO craft, below we share some tips to help get your posts found and naturally inbound quality site traffic your blog.

Optimizing the title of your posts

Unfortunately, many Bloggers don't really give it a second thought when writing the titles of their blog posts. In other words, they don't optimize their headlines for topical keyword relevancy, which makes it difficult for search engines to define and rank posts accordingly.

The trick is to include the keyword at the start of your post headline. Google scans for keywords starting from the post headline. It then scans the last paragraph of your post. So if you included the keywords in their relevant places, you'd have a better chance of your posts showing up.

It's important that the title of your post get shared among individuals all over the web. That calls for creativity, which basically means that it must raise curiosity for people to look into that specific post. The more your posts are shared, the higher the chances of getting ranked. That's because of the engagement factor, thanks to social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Note: Don't forget to research on your keywords. You could even use the free Google analytics tool to find the best keywords for the titles of your post. You can also check out this great resource at FindLaw.com which shows more tips and techniques for keyword selection for law firms and legal professionals.

Respecting the value of links and anchor text

Just like we said in point number 1, search engines don't scan everything you write. Instead, they focus on certain parts of your posts, like your headlines, your sub-headings, anchor text, and alt text of images.

Now, whenever you insert a link, it will be highlighted with the color of your choice. These links can also act as keywords when search engines are crawling your web pages. Your safest bet would be to include relevant keywords where appropriate, especially on your headlines, sub-headers, hyperlinks etc.

Researching keywords parallel to blog post toics

Most newbie bloggers find it hard to choose a topic they would want to write on to make some money. In most cases, they have a passion for one or multiple topics. However, the problem is, not all topics are profitable.

To plan for your blog, start by evaluating the motive of your blog. For instance, if you want to attract more readers and make more money, you'd be better off with business, finance, health/lifestyle, and relationships topics. These are very profitable topics because people are always concerned with these areas.

If you're interest falls under any one of the above, you are lucky. Now your only task is to research on the relevant keywords to use as the main subject of your blog. For more on this, scope out this read at Moz which offers insights in choosing quality keywords that your target audience is searching for.

Researching on keywords is very easy. Just use one of the many free tools available online to find out which words are profitable. The best thing is that these tools even suggest which keywords are most popular, and by what percentage. If you're using Google analytics for instance, make sure you choose keywords worth not less than $1. The value of the keyword in question stands for the number of times it's searched online, so you'd be better off if you created a blog around that keyword.

Also, remember to check the competitiveness of the keywords you want to pick and build a blog around. They are basically categorized as high, medium and low. It's advisable that you don't choose ''high'' because competition is very stiff with these keywords, meaning it would be a struggle to get to the top with such keywords.

However, ''medium'' or ''low'' is just fine, considering the fact that they are not very competitive. If you chose to build your topics around them, your posts would start showing up on search engines in as little as 2 to 3 weeks.

Optimizing your blog for mobile compatibility

A growing number of people are now accessing the web via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Because of this trend, Google has already begun to devalue websites that are not mobile-friendly. As a result, mobile-friendly SEO is becoming a popular sub-set to search marketing.

You might have great content for people to read. However, if your site is not optimized for the large percentage of people using mobile devices, you might not benefit. Consult with a professional mobile SEO provider who might be able to help give you suggestions on how to improve mobile visibility with your site.

You could edit your HTML to make your blog mobile-friendly if your platform doesn't come with an automatic mobile version of your site. You want to take advantage of the numbers, besides creating quality content.

Verdict
Blog SEO requires some hard work though. But since you know what to do, you can always start the process of optimizing your blog, both for the search engines and the readers for maximum exposure. Use the tips above to start generating some good traffic.

When law firms turn to the resources and experience of a local SEO company, there are several considerations that need to be kept top of mind. From link building and social media to communications and reporting, many aspects must be highlighted upon hiring an SEO company.

In this article, we dive into the top considerations that your law firm should have when recruiting the help of a proficient SEO company.

Educate Yourself

The first and perhaps most important aspect of being a savvy shopper for SEO services is to learn a bit about SEO yourself. Understanding the differences in on-page and off-page SEO, link generation, citations, and other basic principals will enable you to weed out the companies that might not be aligned with your best interests. A few good resources to learn about local SEO are the blogs of Moz and Click Centric SEO.

Experience & Track Record

A local SEO firm should offer some degree of experience helping local clients. Be sure to ask for examples, case studies, or referrals from other local companies in the area. Proof of success is a vital decision when investing in an SEO company, because results and rankings should never be guaranteed. Guaranteed rankings should raise a red flag.

No Guarantee in Ranking

Dovetailing on the previous consideration: no legitimate SEO company should guarantee search engine rankings. It's only a fallacy that a company claims to control Google rankings. Solid SEO companies do what they can to the best of the ability, and some service providers may be able to provide approximations of when and how high a site will rank based on a thorough competitive analysis.

Link Generation

Generating links is one of the most important components of any law firm SEO strategy. Link building is one facet of SEO that has gotten a lot of attention recently. The link generation tactics that worked last year may get you penalized this year. As a result, it's important to understand how your prospective SEO company generates links to your site. In short, natural link generation is vital for sustainable success.

Services Beyond SEO

Most SEO firms these days offer more than just SEO services. Some of the more comprehensive SEO companies also offer web design, mobile marketing, and related services. One service that should now (almost always) be integrated with SEO is social media marketing. Even if the firm offers insights and consulting on how social activity can influence SEO, this is a huge consideration that you law firm mush consider.

Social Media Marketing

Integrating social media with SEO go hand in hand. The social signals (shares, likes, tweets, etc.) that stem from social media can influence search engine credibility and overall keyword rankings. It's often best if your SEO firm can provide guidance and offer ideas of social media marketing strategies that will help facilitate the SEO strategy.

Far too often, law firms find themselves working with local SEO companies in Peoria, IL that don't meet the mark. The profession is not easy as best practices are constantly evolving. Seek out those adaptive SEO firms that can help you achieve sustainable, long-term results that not only benefit your SEO efforts and keyword rankings, but your overall inbound marketing efforts in getting quality cases.

There are countless strategies to attract links and generate traffic, but only some tactics are within the capabilities of most search marketers.

Creating link bait to boost your SEO strategy is not an easy task. It requires some serious planning and strong motivation to streamline success. To help ingnite your ideas in devizing some link baiting strategies that will help empower your site's SEO perforamce, we share some creative ideas we have found around the web.

1. Create Incentivizing Content

If you are going to create content, use it to gain favor with other people. A blog is an essential element of any link baiting tactics. From a tactical standpoint, a blog is a means to an end. However, creating a blog will not automatically build links. What you do with your blog is what builds links.

Creating high-quality content on a consistent basis will build internal links by linking out of your posts, and at the same time, it will give you the ability to attract links to your content naturally.

2. Write eBooks and Downloadable PDF's/Resources

If you have written a few eBooks, there is a dense concentration of eBook directories where you can get links. If you have not written an eBook, you need not write a particular eBook for this purpose. You can just reformat the current content of your blog into an eBook.

Furthermore, if you have any PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint Presentations, or any other downloadable resources, you can submit them to online file sharing sites such as Issuu, Scribd, and SlideShare, and getting a link in return.

3. Produce Audio or Visual Content

One of the most commonly overlooked link baiting strategy is the use of visual and audio content for the links. Often, bloggers are struggling to find relevant images, audio, and video for their content, so you can take advantage of this opportunity by creating your own.

When other people use your audio or visual content, you will get an attribution link which can definitely help with SEO. So keep a camera or any recording device handy, especially when you are attending an industry event or relevant meeting of interest. You can also use this technique to create a visual content with pretty images and attention-grabbing quotes.

You can also build up channel on YouTube and entice visitors to check out (and share) videos. Peoria SEO company OIC Group, is starting to create an in-house studio for its local SEO clients to make short optimized videos. Ideas like these will fuel future SEO and content strategies.

4. Make Use of Social Media Tools

Although, on the first look, social media and link baiting seem to be two disconnected components of online marketing strategy, you can integrate social media into your link baiting tactics. With the growth of social media platform such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and many more, emails are no longer the best way to get in touch with someone.

The tremendous growth of social media channels has proven that real outreach through these platforms can yield high response rates and ultimately, links. In many international markets, it has been proven that more people check their social media account more often than their email. Thus, the use of social media is worth pursuing because there is a great chance that shares on these platforms can work just like links from another website.

5. Utilize Paid Techniques

If you have plenty of room in your marketing budget, you may consider pursuing some paid tactics. Although Google abhors paid links, there are acceptable techniques that are worth pursuing.

If you have a product or service, you can pay for a review, and in return, you will be linked in the review. You can also pay some authorities to embed your badges.

Keep in mind, that while Google is against paid links, it is difficult to identify whether the link was placed naturally or unnaturally. A paid link that remains undetected will increase your audience’s trust and brand awareness.

In order to devise an effective and powerful link bait, you need to keep a proper mindset. You must be in the right frame of mind in order to concoct a link bait that will be able to cultivate natural links from relevant sources, and, inevitably, will translate into great conversion.

If you're aspiring for success in generating quality leads online, there's no two way about it. You must polish your online marketing strategies in a way that favors you more than your competitor. You must use the power of reviews, whether positive or negative. And finally, you must also ensure that fake reviews don't harm your reputation since people always have a way of finding out if your products or services are poor in quality yet reviews are rating them 5 star or even more.

Research has confirmed that 84% of first time consumers will buy after they've been recommended by someone else. The rest will buy regardless or whether they are recommended or not. The problem is that the rest is just too small a percentage to take you anywhere. The higher the number, the closer you'll get to your goals when you pay attention to where the numbers are rising.

You must also look for effective ways to combat negative reputation online before they damage business. It takes a paragraph of negative words to destroy your business completely. So, if you're going to take advantage of online reviews, how are you going to do it?

Evaluate where you currently stand in reviews

If you are relatively new in business and you still don't have reviews, it's imperative that you register your profile with major review websites such as Angie's list, YP.com and many others. When someone reviews your products or services, whether positive or negative, you'll receive notifications.

Address negative reviews as soon as possible

Most businesses will ignore negative reviews and ratings, them try to trick search engines by posting hundreds of positive reviews to counter a few negative reviews that exist on the web. Well, you do this, you'll survive for sometime, but not forever.

Remember that one negative review can stay online forever. Definitely people will come across it no matter how you try to hide it. Now the best way to handle that situation is to address the negative review by providing a resolution as fast as possible. As long as you keep it professional, you'll get far.

Generate reviews by asking your customers to do so

The most legitimate way approach review generation is to ask your customers to say or write what they are thinking about your services and offers. Most customers will be honest if they were not pleased with your products or services. Then you can work on that to improve them for customers to like them next time.

Reviews also have a way of giving useful insights into what should be done and what should be left the way it was. If a customer reviews your product, they may suggest a few things, on top of reviewing how their experience was like when they used your products or services. A little survey may be helpful for your SEO efforts.

Capitalize on positive reviews

When you are a small business and you've managed to attract a few positive ones, make sure that people see them. You must have a facebook fanpage where you can always update testimonials. You can also post them on the homepage of your website on the testimonial section for people to see them.

Consumers want assurance before they can purchase. Testimonials that are credible and visible to read is what they need, nothing else.

Don't waste time crying over a few negative reviews online

Truth is, a few people won't like you no matter how hard you try to improve your products. Critics are always there to challenge you, and they will never like what you do. Once you understand that, focus on the large portion of the population that appreciates you. Remember that the numbers will work for you.

You can always leverage your SEO efforts when you take advantage of online reviews. Follow the 5 steps above and you'll begin seeing quality leads coming your way after some time.

What's Co-occurence and How Does it Impact SEO

"Co-occurence" spawned in late 2012 when Rand Fishkin mentioned it in a Whiteboard Friday presentation.

Rand pointed out a couple mildly-authoritative websites (that had little to no on-page SEO done) that were ranking highly for competitive keyword phrases. Additionally and after assessing the backlink portfolio of these mysteriously ranking sites, the anchor text of the links pointing to the sites was not keyword-optimized.

So what enabled these sites to rank so highly for competitive keyword phrases?

Co-occurence.

That is, the occurrence of certain keywords surrounding a link can influence the link (and the link destination's) relevancy for those surrounding keywords.

For example, let's imagine that the text of an article mentions mobile phones six times in one paragraph. A natural outbound link in that paragraph will assume some degree of keyword relevancy on mobile phones due to the co-occurence of that phrase surrouding the link.

You dig?

Moving forward as an adaptive SEO provider, you should keep the concept of co-occueance top of mind to ensure the transparency (and the effectiveness) of your SEO services and strategies. SEO is becoming a game of survival of the fittest, and only the SEO experts who adapt to the rapidly evolving standards of Google search will win.